China Seizes on a Dark Chapter for Tibet

GYANTSE, Tibet â€” The white fortress loomed above the fields, a crumbling but still imposing redoubt perched on a rock mound above a plane of golden rapeseed shimmering in the morning light.The fortress in Gyantse, built in the late 1300s, fell to the British in 1904.After the British left, China increased its control of Tibet.

A battle here in 1904 changed the course of Tibetan history. A British expedition led by Sir Francis E. Younghusband, the imperial adventurer, seized the fort and marched to Lhasa, the capital, becoming the first Western force to pry open Tibet and wrest commercial concessions from its senior lamas.

The bloody invasion made the Manchu rulers of the Qing court in Beijing realize that they had to bring Tibet under their control rather than continue to treat it as a vassal state.

So, in 1910, well after the British had departed, 2,000 Chinese soldiers occupied Lhasa. That ended in 1913, after the disintegration of the Qing dynasty, ushering in a period of de facto independence that many Tibetans cite as the modern basis for a sovereign Tibet.

The Chinese Communists seized Tibet again in 1951, perhaps influenced by the Qing emperorâ€™s earlier decision to invade the mountain kingdom.

These days, Gyantse resembles other towns in central Tibet. Its dusty roads are lined with shops and restaurants run by ethnic Han migrants, whom many Tibetans see as the most recent wave of invaders.

But Chinese officials prefer to direct the worldâ€™s attention away from that and to the brutal events at Gyantse in 1904, which conveniently fit into their master narrative for Tibetan and Chinese history.

The Chinese government insists Tibet is an â€œinalienableâ€ part of China, and it has appropriated the 1904 invasion as another chapter in the long history of imperialist efforts to dismantle China â€” what the Communist education system calls the â€œ100 years of humiliation.â€

In that Communist narrative of Gyantse, the Tibetans are a stand-in for the Chinese who were victimized by foreign powers during the Qing dynasty.

â€œThe local people resisted the British there,â€ said Dechu, a Tibetan woman from the foreign affairs office in Lhasa who accompanied foreign journalists on a recent official tour of Tibet. â€œThey put up a great resistance, so itâ€™s called the City of Heroes.â€

In the late 1990s, when Britain was handing Hong Kong back to China, the Chinese government started a propaganda campaign to highlight that theme.

A melodramatic movie about the 1904 British invasion, â€œRed River Valley,â€ was released in 1997. It was a hit, and Chinese still rave about it. It was also required viewing for officials in Tibet and for many schoolchildren.

â€œIâ€™ve also seen a musical, two plays, another feature film and a novella on the same topic, all from that time,â€ Robert Barnett, a Tibet scholar at Columbia University, said of the late 1990s. He said that he had not seen any reference in Tibetan literature to Gyantse as the City of Heroes before then.

In 2004, the centenary of the British invasion, officials staged activities to commemorate it, including a musical, â€œThe Bloodbath in the Red River Valley.â€

Then there is the museum in the fort. A sign in English once identified it as â€œthe Memorial Hall of Anti-British.â€ In 1999, it displayed â€œshoddy relief sculptures of battle scenes, with unintelligible captions,â€ according to Patrick French, a historian who described his visit there in his book â€œTibet, Tibet.â€

So what did happen in Gyantse in 1904?

The Younghusband expedition was sent by Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, to force the 13th Dalai Lama to agree to commercial concessions. Tibet had also begun to figure prominently in what was known as the Great Game, where the British and Russian empires vied for influence in Central Asia.

British officials had heard of a Russian presence in the court of the Dalai Lama and wanted to learn the truth. That meant getting officers to Lhasa, which had never been done before.

Colonel Younghusband was teamed with Brig. Gen. J. R. L. Macdonald to lead a force from Sikkim, in British India, across the Jelap Pass into Tibet. They crossed the border on Dec. 12, 1903, with more than 1,000 soldiers, 2 Maxim guns and 4 artillery pieces, according to â€œTrespassers on the Roof of the World,â€ a history of Western efforts to open Tibet, by Peter Hopkirk. Behind them, in the snow, trailed 10,000 coolies, 7,000 mules, 4,000 yaks and 6 camels.

Outside the village of Guru, they encountered an encampment of 1,500 Tibetan troops. Hostilities broke out. The British troops, which included Sikhs and Gurkhas, opened fire. In four minutes, 700 poorly armed Tibetans lay dead or dying.

Later, at Red Idol Gorge, a narrow defile just 20 miles from Gyantse, the British slaughtered another 200 Tibetans.

The Tibetans made their final stand at the fort at Gyantse, called a dzong, or jong, in Tibetan. After they missed a deadline to surrender on July 5, the British attacked from the southeast corner of the fort.

A thin line of officers and soldiers clambered up the sheer rock face. â€œThe steepness was so great that a man who slipped almost necessarily carried away the man below him also,â€ wrote Perceval Landon of The Times of London.

The Tibetans rained down ammunition and stones. But one lieutenant and an Indian soldier made it through the breach, followed by others. The Tibetans fled, shimmying down two ropes.

â€œThe surrender of the jong was to have a crushing effect on Tibetan morale,â€ Mr. Hopkirk wrote. â€œThere was an ancient superstition that if ever the great fortress were to fall into the hands of an invader, then further resistance would be pointless.â€

The British reached Lhasa soon afterward. Two months later, the evening before leaving Lhasa for good, Colonel Younghusband rode out to a mountain and gazed down at the ancient city, where he experienced a curious epiphany that inspired him to end all acts of bloodshed and found a religious movement, the World Congress of Faiths.

â€œThis exhilaration of the moment grew and grew till it thrilled through me with overpowering intensity,â€ he wrote in a memoir, â€œIndia and Tibet.â€ â€œNever again could I think evil, or ever again be at enmity with any man. All nature and all humanity were bathed in a rosy glowing radiancy; and life for the future seemed naught but buoyancy and light.â€

If Tibet had also became British colony, it would be a huge trouble between China and India forever. The south Tibet (Arunachal Pradesh) was actually a part of British colony over Tibet after 1914, which already created a border war between two counties in 1960â€™s. This dispute will continue to be a friction between them if India is still not reluctant to return it to China.